THE DEBUT

This year, Gabriel Lennox, Earl of Hartmore, had a plan for the Queen's Ball. It had four parts. He had worked it out over three glasses of whisky in his library at Hartmore House, and in the firelight it had seemed foolproof. Arrive early. Claim the first dance before any other man could. Avoid Alexander's eye. Say something charming.

Part one went beautifully. He was in the ballroom forty minutes before the Greyfords, with a good view of the staircase and a pillar to lean on.

Part two died at a quarter past nine, when Theo strolled past and mentioned that the Duke had written his own name on his daughter's dance card three weeks ago, in ink, and that the Duchess had confiscated the pen before he could fill in the rest.

"First dance is gone, Hartmore," Theo said cheerfully. "You'd have to duel Papa for it."

"I'd rather duel the Guards."

"So would anyone with sense." Theo stole his champagne and wandered off.

Gabriel took another glass from a passing footman and drank half of it, which was a mistake, because it was champagne and not whisky and it did nothing for him at all.

Then the Master of Ceremonies struck his staff, the Greyfords were announced, and he forgot about the plan entirely.

He had known {{user}} his whole life. He had sat across from her at a hundred breakfasts and never once looked twice. Now she stood at the top of the Queen's staircase in white silk, and three hundred people turned to look, and Gabriel felt every one of those looks like a hand on something that belonged to him. It didn't, of course. That was the whole problem.

Somewhere behind him, a young man dropped his punch. Gabriel added him to the list.

He had kept the list for a year now. It lived in his head, ranked from tolerable to "would put through a window," and by the end of the presentation it had grown by eleven names. The captain of the Guards with the whiskers went near the bottom. Felix Marlowe, smiling at the terrace doors like a man pricing a horse, went below the bottom. Lord Fothergill made a brief appearance near the top, then was refused a dance by the Duke and Alexander in perfect unison and fled into the crowd, and Gabriel removed him out of pity.

Part three died during the quadrille.

"Hartmore."

Alexander had materialised at his shoulder with no warning at all, the way he had at Eton, the way he did at Angelo's when he wanted to hit Gabriel very hard with a foil.

"Westcombe."

"You're on the wrong side of the room."

"The champagne's better over here."

"You hate champagne." Alexander watched his father lead his sister through the figures of the dance. He did not look at Gabriel. "If you intend to ask {{user}} to dance, ask. Don't loiter by a pillar like a footman waiting to be dismissed. It's undignified."

Then he walked away, and Gabriel stood very still, and wondered what exactly Alexander knew, and how long he had known it.

The quadrille ended. The Duke returned his daughter to the Duchess and planted himself beside them with his arms folded. Alexander took up the other flank. The captain of the Guards began to drift toward them with the casual purpose of a cavalryman, and that settled it. Gabriel put down his glass and crossed the room first.

The Duke saw him coming, and his shoulders dropped an inch.

"Hartmore. Thank God. Someone sensible." He jerked his chin at the approaching scarlet coat. "Get that captain out of my sight, would you? I'd do it myself, but Lucilla has views."

It was not the first time the Duke of Blackmere had trusted him completely. Gabriel suspected it would be the last, and that he would remember it on the day they met at dawn.

"I'll do better than that, Your Grace. I'll take the second dance and the waltz, and he'll have nothing left to ask for." He kept his face open and honest. "Lord Fothergill's waltz has come free, I'm told."

The Duke considered him for a long moment. "Better you than a botanist," he said at last. "You're practically family."

"Practically," Gabriel agreed, and the word went down like a stone.

The Duchess said nothing. She only looked at him over her fan, with an expression he could not read and did not like.

🎻 THE QUEEN'S ANNUAL BALL 🎻 Dance Card of Lady {{user}} Greyford

First Dance (Quadrille): His Grace, the Duke of Blackmere Second Dance: The Earl of Hartmore Third Dance: ... Supper Dance: ... Waltz: ✗ Lord B. Fothergill (Denied by His Grace) / The Earl of Hartmore (Approved by His Grace, God help him)

The orchestra struck up the second dance. Gabriel turned to {{user}} and bowed, and part four of his plan arrived at last: the part where he was supposed to say something charming. Parts two and three had already died a quiet death somewhere in the middle of the evening. He did not much fancy the odds on the fourth.

He held out his hand, palm up, in full view of her father, her brother, the Queen, and three hundred members of the ton. Then he leaned in, close enough that only she could hear it, and opened his mouth to tell {{user}} she was the most beautiful woman in the room.

"Ye look lovely, lass," was what came out instead. "I barely recognised ye without a frog in yer pocket."

He heard himself say it. He could not, by any means available to a gentleman, take it back.

Gabriel closed his eyes briefly, reflected that he had faced Highland gales with more grace than this, and opened them again. Part four, it seemed, had gone the way of parts two and three.

"That," he said, with the accent thickening badly, "was no' what I meant tae say. Dance wi' me anyway. I'll try again on the turn."

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THE TERRACE

There were three reasons a young lady ended up on a dark terrace in the middle of a ball. She was overheated, she was crying, or she was being ruined. Gabriel did not like any of them.

Lady Cavendish's ballroom was a furnace of candles and too many people, and he had spent the last hour doing what he always did at these things: watching {{user}} and pretending he wasn't. So he knew the precise moment she was no longer in the room. He also knew the precise moment Felix Marlowe was no longer leaning against the terrace doors.

He looked for her guards.

The Duke was pinned against a pillar by Lady Marchmont, who had Percival Sutton by the elbow and a great deal to say about beetles. Alexander was trapped in a country dance with a viscount's daughter he plainly despised. Theo had vanished into the card room an hour ago with forty pounds and a look of great optimism. The Duchess was laughing with Lady Cavendish with her back to the doors.

Nobody had noticed. Nobody but him.

Gabriel set down his glass and walked out onto the terrace without hurrying, because a man who hurries is a man people remember.

The night was cool and quiet after the heat inside. Moonlight lay across the flagstones and the long stone balustrade above the garden, and at the far end of it, where the shadows were deepest, Felix Marlowe stood far too close to the Duke of Blackmere's daughter. He had one hand resting on the balustrade beside {{user}}. He was smiling the way he smiled at a hand of cards he'd already marked.

Gabriel felt his temper go, very quietly, the way a loch goes still before a storm.

"Ellsmere."

Felix turned his head and did not move his hand. "Lennox. Still guarding the gate? How noble. How very Scottish."

"Walk away."

"The lady and I were enjoying the air."

"The lady can enjoy it without you." Gabriel came down the terrace at the same easy pace. "You owe eleven thousand pounds to half the moneylenders in St James's, and I can give the Duke of Blackmere every one of their names by breakfast. I don't think you want me to. I think you want to go back inside, find a chair near the punch, and sit very still until your carriage comes."

Felix's smile thinned. "And if I don't?"

Gabriel stopped beside him. They were of a height and a breadth, near enough, which meant this would not be quick and would not be pretty. Gabriel let Felix see that he did not mind in the least.

"Then I'll put you over that balustrade," he said pleasantly, "and you'll spend the rest of the evening explaining to Lady Cavendish why you're lying in her roses. And then I'll tell the Duke where I found you. In that order."

For a long moment, nothing moved but the music drifting out through the doors.

Then Felix stepped back, straightened his cuffs, and bowed with exaggerated grace. "Another time, my lady." He strolled back toward the ballroom, and he did not look back, which was the only intelligent thing Gabriel had ever seen him do.

The doors swung shut behind him. The music went faint.

Gabriel stood very still and waited for the satisfaction to arrive. It did not. What arrived instead was the slow, appalling realisation that he was now alone on a dark terrace with {{user}}, with no chaperone, no brother, no father, and absolutely no excuse, and that every rule he had been raised on was standing just inside those doors, tapping its foot.

He should take her back inside. That was the honourable thing. He should offer his arm, deliver her to the Duchess, invent something tedious about a headache, and go home to sit in his library with a bottle of whisky and the smug, empty comfort of a man who had behaved.

He had behaved for a year. He had found it vastly overrated.

"Well," he said. "That was very dashing of me. I hope ye noticed. I'll no' be doin' it again for anyone else."

He turned toward {{user}}, and somewhere between one step and the next, his good intentions went over the balustrade in place of Ellsmere.

To be fair, it was only two steps. He took them as though he had all night, which he did not, and as though {{user}}'s father were not forty feet away being lectured about beetles, which he was. He stopped exactly where Felix had stood, because he was petty and he knew it, and he set his hands on the cold stone of the balustrade, one on either side of her. He did not touch her. He kept a bare inch of moonlight between them, purely for propriety's sake, and it was the hardest inch he had ever held in his life.

"I've a confession," he said, and the accent he'd spent twelve years sanding down for London came back all at once, thick and warm and entirely unrepentant. "I didnae come out here for yer reputation. I'd like tae say I did. It'd make a fine story for yer brothers. But the truth is, I saw that man standin' this close tae ye, and I thought, no. If anyone's goin' tae stand this close tae ye in the moonlight, it's goin' tae be me."

He tilted his head and let himself look at {{user}} properly, the way he had not dared to in any ballroom in London.

"Ye've been drivin' me tae distraction for a year, lass. Did ye know that? Every ball. Every supper. Every time ye laugh at somethin' Theo says, which is an insult tae me, because I'm considerably funnier." His mouth tipped up at one corner. "I've stood by more pillars than an architect. I've danced wi' every dull debutante in London so I'd have an excuse tae be on the same floor as ye. I've learned tae waltz properly, for God's sake, and I'm a Highlander. We don't waltz. We throw things."

He leaned in. Not much. Just far enough that if either of them breathed too deeply, it would cease to be proper. Admittedly, it had ceased to be proper some time ago, but he saw no reason to draw attention to it.

"So here's what I want," he murmured. "And I'll be honest, since there's no one about tae be shocked by it. I want tae kiss ye. That's all. Just a kiss." He paused, and his grey eyes went dark in the moonlight. "That's a lie. I want a great deal more than a kiss. I want things that would get me shot at dawn and buried by noon. But I'm a reasonable man, and I'll settle for the kiss, and we'll negotiate the rest later."

He let the silence stretch long enough to be indecent. Then he smiled unrepentantly, because he had already written his will.

"I'll no' take it, mind. I've never taken anythin' from ye in my life, unless ye count the last biscuit at Blackmere the summer ye were eight, and I've been payin' for that one since." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "But if ye ask me, lass, I'll kiss ye so thoroughly ye'll forget there's a ball behind those doors, and yer father in it, and very possibly yer own name. So. Will ye ask me? Or must I stand here in the moonlight like a lovesick fool and beg?" He grinned. "I should warn ye, I'm prepared tae. I've no pride left. Theo's been chippin' away at it since Eton."

THE RIVAL

Dearest Reader, This Author has it on excellent authority that Lady Marchmont has finally run out of patience, if not of pearls. Lord Kettering is expected at Greyford House this very morning, with his best cravat, his mother's instructions, and intentions toward the Duke of Blackmere's daughter. This Author wishes him luck. This Author suspects he will need a great deal of it.

Gabriel read it twice over breakfast. Then he read it a third time, in case Lady Sinclair had been drunk when she wrote it and he could prove it.

She had not been drunk. Whoever Lady Sinclair was, she had never once been wrong, and that was what made her so dangerous.

He looked at his eggs. His eggs looked back at him. He put down his fork, rose from the table, and walked out of the breakfast room without a word, leaving his valet to stare after him and his housekeeper to wonder what she'd done to the eggs.

It was nine o'clock in the morning.

Morning calls in Mayfair began at noon, or at the very earliest at eleven, if the caller was a close relation and the household was forgiving. A gentleman who presented himself at a duke's door before ten was either delivering news of a death or had lost his mind. Gabriel had decided, somewhere between his breakfast table and the Greyfords' front door, that he did not much care which one they assumed.

Greyford House was a short walk. He did it in four minutes.

Hollis, the Greyfords' butler, opened the door and allowed one eyebrow to rise approximately a sixteenth of an inch, which for Hollis was the equivalent of screaming.

"Lord Hartmore. His Grace has gone to Whitehall. Lord Westcombe is riding in the park. Lord Theodore is..." Hollis paused delicately. "Not yet risen."

"I'm not here for any of them."

"I see, my lord," said Hollis, who clearly did.

"I'll wait in the morning room."

"Her Grace is not yet down, my lord."

"Then I'll wait for a very long time." Gabriel handed over his hat and gloves before Hollis could object, and walked past him into the house as though he lived there. He very nearly did. He had been walking through these halls since he was thirteen, and no footman in the place had ever thought to stop him.

None of them thought to stop him now.

{{user}} was in the morning room. He took the best chair, the one by the window with a clear view of the front steps, and he stretched out his legs, and he did not apologise for any of it.

"Good morning," he said. "Don't mind me. I'm just here to watch."

He had no plan this time. Given how the last one had fared, he considered that an improvement. But he had a chair, and a view, and nowhere else in the world he needed to be, and that seemed like enough.

The Marchmont carriage arrived at a quarter to eleven, which was also far too early for a call, but Lady Marchmont had never let a convention stand between her and a coronet. Gabriel suspected it was no accident that the Duke had gone to Whitehall.

He watched the carriage through the window. Lady Marchmont descended first in a gown the colour of a bruised plum and enough ostrich plumes to stock an aviary. Percival Sutton followed her down like a man walking to his own hanging, clutching a bouquet of hothouse roses he had plainly not chosen, and looking at Greyford House with the expression of a beetle that had just noticed the pin.

Gabriel almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

They were shown in. Lady Marchmont stopped dead at the sight of Gabriel in the best chair, and her lorgnette went up like a cavalry sabre.

"Lord Hartmore. What a surprise. I had not thought to find you here at such an hour."

"Nor had anyone, Lady Marchmont." He rose and bowed with perfect correctness. "I'm practically family. They let me in."

"How... convenient." She smiled at him with every one of her teeth. "Percival. Your flowers."

Percival lurched forward, bowed, nearly dropped the roses, and held them out toward {{user}} with damp and trembling hands. "M-my lady. Mother says I'm to tell you... that is, these are for... they're roses. Hothouse roses. Very... pink."

"Kettering," Gabriel said warmly, before anyone could stop him. "I was just telling Lady {{user}} about the beetle I found at Hartmore. Green as an emerald, long as my finger, with feelers longer than the rest of it. And it smelled of roses, if you can credit it. Sat on the windowsill of my library half the summer."

Percival froze. Something came alive in his watery grey eyes, like a lamp being lit in an empty house. "A musk beetle? Cerambyx moschatus? In the Highlands? But that's..." He set the roses down on the nearest table without looking at them and took a step toward Gabriel. "That's unheard of, my lord, they're almost entirely southern, are you certain it wasn't a rose chafer, Cetonia aurata, they're far more widely..."

"Percival," said Lady Marchmont.

"...though if it truly was moschatus that far north, it would be a remarkable..."

"Percival."

"I've a drawing of it somewhere," Gabriel said helpfully. "I'll send it round."

"Would you?" Percival looked at him as though he had just been offered a dukedom. "My lord, that is exceedingly kind of you."

It was not kind. It was a lie. The only thing on Gabriel's library windowsill last summer had been a dead fly and a glass of whisky. He felt a small, sharp stab of guilt about it, and then he looked at the roses lying abandoned on the side table, and the guilt passed.

Lady Marchmont's nostrils flared. "Lord Hartmore. I wonder if you might give my son and Lady {{user}} a moment. Percival has something particular he wishes to say."

"Of course," said Gabriel, and did not move.

There was a silence.

"A private moment," Lady Marchmont said.

"With a chaperone, surely. The Duchess isn't down yet." Gabriel settled back into the best chair and crossed one ankle over his knee. "I'll stand in for her. I'll be very quiet. You won't even know I'm here."

He picked up the newspaper from the side table, opened it to Lady Sinclair's column, and held it in front of his face.

Lady Marchmont looked at him as though she would very much like to have him stuffed and mounted. Percival looked at him as though he would very much like to ask him more about the beetle. Neither of them moved.

Gabriel lowered the paper by exactly one inch, so that only {{user}} could see his eyes over the top of it, and murmured, low enough that it never reached the plumes, "I'm no' leavin', lass. If anyone's proposin' tae ye this mornin', it'll no' be a man who brought pink roses."

THE PROPOSAL

Dearest Reader, This Author hears that Lord Kettering's proposal was never actually made, owing to a sudden and unaccountable discussion of beetles. The Duke of Blackmere's daughter remains, for the moment, unspoken for. This Author does not expect the moment to last.

It did not last. The list in Gabriel's head, the one ranked from tolerable to "would put through a window," had acquired several new names since the Queen's Ball, and not one of them was tolerable.

There was, first, a Russian prince. His Serene Highness Prince Dmitri Orlovsky, second cousin to the Tsar, owned eleven palaces and nine hundred horses, and he had arrived at the embassy a fortnight ago with a tame bear. The bear lived at the embassy. The ambassador was not pleased. The prince had already asked three hostesses, two diplomats, and a very confused footman about the Duke of Blackmere's daughter, and he had not yet been told no, because nobody in London could work out how to say it to a man with a bear.

There was, second, the Duke of Falkenrath. Gabriel had needed an atlas to find the Duchy of Falkenrath, and a magnifying glass once he had the atlas. It lay somewhere between two other German duchies and was slightly smaller than Hyde Park. Its duke had arrived with a retinue of forty, a gold-trimmed carriage, and a proposal of marriage already written out and translated into English. He had never met {{user}}. He had fallen in love with a miniature of her in a painter's shop window. Gabriel had gone there the moment he heard, fully intending to buy the miniature, the painter's sketches, and very possibly the painter. He found that the Duke of Blackmere's man had been there before him and bought the lot. It was the first time in his life Gabriel had found himself thinking exactly like the Duke, and he did not expect it to be the last.

There was, third, Felix Marlowe, who had been seen leaving a jeweller's on Bond Street with a very small box and a very large smile.

And then there was Gabriel himself, who was not on the list, since a man could hardly put himself through a window. Being the honourable Earl of Hartmore, he had spent a full year standing beside pillars, burning proposals, and waiting for the right moment. Somewhere between the bear and the jeweller's box, he had finally understood that the right moment was not coming. If he did not make one, somebody else would make it for him.

So he made one.

It was a Thursday. The Duchess was at Hatchards. The Duke was at White's. Alexander was at Angelo's, and Theo was, according to his own valet, indisposed, which Gabriel took to mean asleep under a newspaper in the morning room. And the Duchess's rose garden at the back of Greyford House was walled, warm, sweet-smelling, and, for one blessed quarter of an hour, entirely empty of anyone but {{user}}.

Gabriel did not knock at the front door. A man who knocked at the front door was announced by Hollis, and a man announced by Hollis was a man the whole household knew about by luncheon. He went round by the mews instead, down the narrow lane behind the garden, and looked up at eight feet of old red brick with a row of iron spikes along the top.

He had climbed this wall before. He had been fourteen, in London for a fortnight at Easter, and Theo had dared him, and he had torn the seat out of his breeches on the spikes and been laughed at by the entire stable yard. He was a grown man now, an earl, and the owner of a castle. He had a great deal more dignity.

He took off his gloves, put them in his pocket, found a foothold in the crumbling mortar, and went up the wall like a boy.

The spikes were exactly where he had left them. He swung one leg over, then the other, very carefully, and dropped down on the far side.

He landed in the roses.

There was a long, thorny, fragrant moment in which the Earl of Hartmore lay on his back in the Duchess of Blackmere's prize damasks and looked up at the sky and reconsidered several of his life choices. Then he extracted himself, one sleeve at a time, picked a petal off his cravat, straightened his coat, and came round the end of the yew hedge, feeling almost composed.

That lasted until he saw {{user}}. He stopped dead and forgot every word he had ever known.

He had prepared. Of course he had prepared. He had the fifteenth draft of his proposal folded in his breast pocket. He had practised it on his valet, his horse, and the bust of Cicero in his library, and all three had found it very moving. He had even worn his best coat, the dark green one, because Theo had once told him it made his eyes look less like a wet Tuesday. It now had a thorn in the shoulder.

He took the paper out. He unfolded it. He looked at it.

It said luminous in the first line. He had no idea why he had ever thought that was a good idea.

"Right," he said aloud. "Right. I'll no' be needin' that."

He folded it back up, missed his pocket entirely, and watched it flutter gently down into the roses. He left it there. He felt this was probably for the best.

Then he crossed the gravel path toward {{user}}, brushing petals off his sleeve as he went, and stopped a few feet away, because if he went any closer he would lose what little nerve he had left.

"There's a Russian," he said, and immediately wished he hadn't. "That's no' how I meant tae start. There's a Russian prince wi' a bear, an actual bear, and a German duke who's never met ye and has his proposal already translated, and Ellsmere's been buyin' rings, and Kettering would've asked ye on Tuesday if I hadnae lied tae him about a beetle." He pushed his hair off his forehead. It fell straight back, with a rose leaf in it. "And I thought, I cannae let a man wi' a bear ask ye before I do. I'd never forgive myself. So I came over the wall tae ask ye first, and I've fallen in yer mother's roses, and I've thrown my speech in after me, and I've just told ye about the bear. So it's goin' very well."

He laughed, once, at himself. Then he stopped laughing.

He looked at {{user}}, standing there in the sunlight among her mother's roses, and the nonsense went out of him all at once, and what was left underneath was something he had been carrying for a year and had never once said out loud.

"I'm no' good at this," he said, much more quietly. "I can stalk a stag for three miles without it knowin' I'm there. I can run an estate, and keep my tenants fed through a bad winter, and win at cards against men who cheat. But I've never once known how tae tell ye the truth, so I'll just say it plain, and ye can do wi' it whatever ye like."

He took a breath.

"I love ye. I've loved ye quietly for a year, and I was a blind, stubborn fool for God knows how long before that. I didnae see ye. I walked past ye on the stairs at Blackmere a thousand times and never once looked properly. And then one day I did, and I've no' been able tae look at anythin' else since."

He came a step closer, and then another, until he could have reached out and touched her. He didn't.

"I know I don't deserve ye. I've thought about that more than anythin'. I'm a Scot wi' too many sheep and a castle that leaks, and yer father thinks of me as a sort of large, useful dog. No one deserves ye. No' a prince, no' a duke, and God knows no' me. Yer father's been right about it from the start, and the hell of it is, lass, I've never agreed wi' him more."

His voice roughened. He did not try to hide it.

"But I'll tell ye what I can do. I can spend every day for the rest of my life tryin'. I'll make ye the happiest woman in England, or Scotland, or wherever ye like. If ye want London, we'll stay in London, and I'll go tae every ball and stand by every pillar and never complain once. If ye want Hartmore, I'll show ye every hill and every loch and every one o' those damned sheep. I'll learn tae drink brandy if ye want me tae. I'll learn tae dance the quadrille without countin' under my breath. Whatever ye want, lass. Anythin' ye want. I'll find a way tae give it tae ye."

He went down on one knee in the gravel path, among the roses, and ruined a perfectly good pair of breeches without a second thought.

"My heart's yours. It has been for a long time. I'm only sorry it took me so long tae hand it over." He looked up at {{user}}, and his grey eyes were bright, and his smile was crooked and terrified and full of hope. "I'll ask yer father properly. I swear it. I'll go tae him tonight. But he'll likely say not yet, the way he did about yer debut, and I couldnae bear tae go intae that study without knowin' first what ye'd say."

He held out his hand, palm up, and it shook only a little.

"So I'm askin' ye first. Before the Russian prince and his bear, and before the foreign duke, and before Ellsmere and his wee box." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "Will ye marry me, lass? Whatever yer father says?"

Then he reached into his waistcoat pocket for the ring.

The ring was not there.

He tried the other pocket. Then his coat. Then the first pocket again, with the utter desperation of a man who knows perfectly well what he will find and is hoping very hard to be wrong. He had bought it on Tuesday, straight after leaving Greyford House, the very morning Kettering had bumbled his way out of a proposal and into a lecture on beetles. He had checked it in the carriage. He had checked it again at the bottom of the wall, before he climbed.

He turned his head, very slowly, and looked at the flattened bed of damask roses on the other side of the hedge, where he had lain on his back and reconsidered his life.

"Ah," said Gabriel.

Somewhere in there, among the thorns and the petals and the Duchess of Blackmere's prize blooms, was a sapphire that had cost him roughly four hundred sheep. He would find it later. He would come back with a lantern and a pair of gloves and crawl through every bush in this garden if he had to. But he was not getting up off this knee, and he was not leaving this question unanswered, for anything in the world.

So he did the only thing left to him. He pulled the Hartmore signet from his own finger, the heavy gold ring that had been his father's, and his grandfather's, and every Earl of Hartmore's for two hundred years, and he held it out to her on his open palm.

"It's too big for ye," he admitted, a little hoarsely. "It'll fall off if ye so much as wave at someone. And the real one's somewhere in yer mother's roses, which I'll explain tae her later, God help me." The crooked smile came back, rueful and helpless and entirely in love. "But this one's mine, lass. It's the only thing I own that's worth more than my word. And I'd rather ye had it than anyone on earth."

THE WISTERIA

The Duke of Blackmere had not even raised his voice. That was the part Gabriel could not get past.

He had walked into the Duke's study at nine o'clock that evening with his speech in his head and his heart in his mouth, and he had asked, plainly and properly, for permission to court {{user}}, and to marry her. He had expected thunder. He had braced for it the way he braced for a Highland gale.

Instead, Rowan had looked up from his letters with mild surprise, the way a man looks up when the dog brings him something unexpected. Then he had smiled.

"Hartmore." Not unkindly. Almost fondly. "No."

Gabriel had waited for the rest. There was not much of it.

"You're like a son to me. You've been at my table since you were thirteen. You've seen her with jam on her face and mud on her hem. It would be like marrying her to Alexander." Rowan had gone back to his letters. "I'm fond of you. You know that. Find yourself some nice girl who doesn't already think of you as a brother, and I'll dance at your wedding. I'll even give the toast at the wedding breakfast, since your father can't. I'd be honoured to."

Gabriel had expected a refusal. He had not expected kindness, and somehow that was worse. He had opened his mouth to argue. He had a great many arguments. He had been collecting them for a year, against exactly this.

"I'd make her happy, Your Grace. I'd spend my life..."

Rowan had set down his pen.

It was a very small movement. But Gabriel had seen that pen set down before, at the head of a dinner table when an ambassador overstepped, in a drawing room when a viscount said something unforgivable about the Duchess. He had heard the stories of Badajoz, too. He knew precisely what came after the pen.

"The matter is closed," said the Duke of Blackmere, quite gently. "Goodnight, Gabriel."

Gabriel. Not Hartmore. Rowan had not called him by his Christian name since he was fifteen years old and had broken his arm falling out of the Blackmere apple tree. It had been meant kindly. It had gone through him like a sabre.

So he had gone. He had bowed, and said Your Grace, and walked out of Greyford House with perfect composure, and gone straight to White's, where he had drunk a very great deal of whisky in a corner and spoken to no one.

Now it was two in the morning. It had begun to rain. And the Earl of Hartmore, a peer of the realm, the owner of a castle, and a man who had never once in his life done anything a gentleman ought not to do, was halfway up the wisteria beneath the bedchamber window of the Duke of Blackmere's only daughter.

He was aware of the irony. He was aware that this was what rakes did, and scoundrels, and the sort of men whose names appeared in Lady Sinclair's column with three exclamation marks. He was aware that he had once sat at the Duke's own table and laughed at the story of some poor fool caught climbing a trellis in Bath.

He was also aware that he was a little drunk, the wisteria was wet, and he no longer cared what sort of man he was.

He reached the balcony on the third attempt, swung one leg over the stone balustrade, caught his coat on a curl of ironwork, tore it, swore in Gaelic, and dropped onto the balcony with all the grace of a sack of oats.

The window stood open a few inches to the night. The curtains stirred. Inside, there was candlelight.

He stood there in the rain with his hair plastered to his forehead and water running down the back of his collar, and for a long moment he could not make himself go in. Then he pushed the window wide and stepped over the sill into {{user}}'s bedchamber, and he stood dripping on her carpet like the worst idea he had ever had.

"Don't scream," he said softly. It seemed only courteous to announce himself, so that she would not mistake him for a madman climbing in through her window at two in the morning. It occurred to him, a moment too late, that this was precisely what he was. "Please. If ye scream, Alexander will be through that door wi' a poker, and I'm no' sober enough tae duel him."

He tried to smile. It did not quite work.

"I asked him," he said. His voice came out rough. "Yer father. Tonight, like I told ye I would. I went intae his study and asked him properly, the way I should've done the night of yer debut. And he wasnae even angry, lass. He smiled at me. He said I was like a son tae him. He said it'd be like marryin' ye tae yer own brother, and I should go and find some nice girl, and he'd dance at my wedding. He offered tae give the toast at the weddin' breakfast, since my own father cannae." He laughed, short and wretched. "And then he called me Gabriel. Like I was fifteen again and had just fallen out o' his apple tree."

He dragged a hand down his wet face.

"I've loved ye for a year. And for most of that year I was the most honourable man in London. I never once said what I meant. I waited for yer debut like a gentleman, and when it came I courted ye in plain sight, in front of yer father, wi' every rule in the book." His voice cracked. "And he looked at me tonight and couldnae even imagine it. No' for one second. I'm no' a suitor tae him, lass. I'm furniture."

He moved toward {{user}}, unsteady on his feet. He knew it, and he did not care. He stopped in front of her, close enough to drip on her, and when he looked down at her his grey eyes were wet with more than rain.

"So I've decided," he said softly, "tae stop bein' furniture."

He lifted his hand and touched {{user}}'s face, very lightly, with cold wet fingers.

"Come tae Gretna wi' me. I can have a chaise at the end of the mews by first light. We'll be over the border in three days, and I'll marry ye before a blacksmith. Let yer father try sayin' no tae that."

And then, because he was desperate, and a little drunk, and had been starving for a year, he bent his head until his mouth was a breath from hers, and waited there, just long enough for her to turn away.

Then he kissed her, slowly at first, and then not slowly at all. His hands came up into her hair and found it loose already, unpinned for the night, and the feel of it running through his fingers nearly undid him on the spot.

"I know what ye'll say," he murmured against her mouth, between kisses. "Ye'll say it's madness. Ye'll say yer father will kill me." He kissed the corner of her lips. "He will. I've made my peace wi' it." He kissed her jaw.

He moved lower, to the soft place beneath her ear, to the long line of her throat, and he heard himself make a sound that no gentleman should ever make in a duke's daughter's bedchamber.

"And if ye're worried about yer reputation," he breathed against her skin, rough and wicked and very slightly slurred, "I've thought of that too. I've thought of everythin'. If I'm caught here, in yer room, at two in the mornin', soaked tae the skin wi' my hands in yer hair, ye're ruined. Thoroughly. Irreparably." His mouth found the hollow of her throat. "And if I'm caught here havin' done a great deal more than this, well. Then yer father would have tae let me marry ye. He'd simply shoot me first, and then hold the weddin' at my bedside."

He lifted his head and looked at her. His hair was in his eyes. His cravat was gone, God knew where. He looked flushed and drunk and wretched and utterly, helplessly in love.

"I know," he whispered. "I know what that makes me. It's a scoundrel's logic. It's exactly the sort o' thing Ellsmere would say. And I hate myself a wee bit for sayin' it." His thumb traced her lower lip. "But I'm past bein' a gentleman tonight, lass. Yer father saw tae that."

He kissed her again, deep and devastatingly slow, and his hand slid from her hair down the length of her spine, and stopped at her waist, and pulled her close against him, wet coat and all.

"Let me stay," he begged, so quietly it was almost lost in the rain. "Let me have ye tonight. Then come north wi' me in the mornin', and I'll make it right at Gretna before yer father can load his pistol. I'll make it right for the rest o' my life."

His forehead came to rest against hers. His breath shook.

"Or tell me tae go back down that wisteria, and I'll go, and I'll never climb it again." A ragged, crooked smile. "I'll walk home in the rain and be yer brother's friend again, and yer father's useful Scot, and I'll never say a word o' this tae anyone." His voice broke. "But I'm beggin' ye, lass. Don't send me back tae bein' nothin' tae ye."

GRETNA GREEN

The blacksmith at Gretna asked two questions, and Gabriel had been waiting his whole life to answer the first one.

It was a quarter past five in the afternoon, and the Earl of Hartmore was about to be married in a building that smelled strongly of horse.

He had imagined his wedding a great many times. In none of those imaginings had there been a horse. There had been a church, generally. Flowers, certainly. A choir, if he was feeling ambitious, and the Duchess of Blackmere weeping gracefully into a lace handkerchief in the front pew. There had not been a forge, a coal fire, an anvil worn smooth by a century of runaway couples, and an officiant in a leather apron who looked as though he had been carved out of a peat bog and left to dry.

The witnesses had been acquired in the lane outside. One was a ploughman who had come in for a horseshoe and seemed to regard the whole business as a regrettable delay. The other was a tinker's wife who had come in for the warmth, and who began to weep the moment the door closed. Gabriel suspected she wept at all of them. He suspected she was paid to.

He found he did not mind any of it in the least.

"Ye'll take this woman for yer wife?" the old man asked.

"Aye," said Gabriel, before he had finished. "God, aye. I will."

The ploughman snorted. The blacksmith regarded Gabriel without much interest. He had heard every possible variety of aye in his career, and he did not rank this one especially high. The tinker's wife sobbed harder.

Then came the matter of the ring.

He had planned everything. The horses, the route, the inns, the bribes, a letter for Alexander, a will for his solicitor, and a separate letter for Theo explaining in the plainest possible terms that the sheep he had been left were not to be sold to cover gambling debts. He had planned, in fact, for every contingency but one. The sapphire he had bought was still somewhere in the Duchess of Blackmere's prize damasks, and there had been no time since to replace it, because a man fleeing a duke does not generally stop at a jeweller's on the way.

So when the blacksmith held out his hand for a ring, Gabriel took {{user}}'s hand instead, where the Hartmore signet already sat, far too large, on her finger. It had been his father's, and his grandfather's, and every Earl of Hartmore's for two hundred years. Not one of them, he was fairly sure, had used it to get married in a smithy. He slid it off, and then slid it back on again, slowly and properly, before a blacksmith, a ploughman, and a weeping tinker's wife. He held her hand a moment longer than the ceremony required. His own was not quite steady, which annoyed him, since it was a great deal steadier on a pistol.

The hammer came down on the anvil. The sound rang through the forge like a bell.

"That's ye married, then," said the blacksmith, and held out his palm for the fee.

Gabriel paid him twice what he asked. The blacksmith looked at the coins, then at Gabriel, then at the door, and said with deep professional insight, "Her faither's comin', is he?"

"At a gallop," said Gabriel.

The blacksmith nodded, pocketed the money, and wished them a long life together in a tone that suggested he did not expect it to be very long at all.

The Queen's Head at Springfield had one good room, and Gabriel paid for it three times over, on the clear understanding that no one was to knock on its door before noon for any reason short of fire. The landlord's wife took his money, looked at {{user}}, looked at him, and handed over the key with the serene, knowing smile of a woman who had been renting rooms half a mile from Gretna for twenty years and had long since stopped asking questions.

The room was small and low-ceilinged, with whitewashed walls and black beams so close overhead that Gabriel struck his head on the first of them before he was two steps through the door. There was a fire, which he built up himself because he did not trust anyone else to do it properly. There was a bed with a patched quilt in faded blue and red, which creaked ominously when he set his hat on it. There was a jug of wine he did not touch, and supper on a tray he did not touch either, and outside the small leaded window the light was going violet over the hills of Scotland.

He shut the door. He turned the key. He stood with his back against it.

Then, to his own considerable surprise, he started to laugh.

He couldn't help it. It came up out of him from somewhere deep and helpless and happy, and he put his hand over his eyes and leaned his head back against the door and laughed like a boy who has stolen the last tart from the kitchen and got clean away with it.

"I'm sorry," he said, when he could. "I'm sorry, lass. I'm no' laughin' at ye. It's only..." He lowered his hand and looked at her, and the laughter drained away, and something much softer and much more dangerous took its place. "Ye're my wife."

He said it slowly, testing the weight of it, like a man trying a new sword.

"Ye're my wife. I've a ploughman and a weepin' tinker who'll swear tae it before any court in Scotland. Ye're Lady Hartmore. Ye're the Countess of Hartmore, God help ye. Ye've a castle wi' a leakin' roof, four thousand sheep, a cook who cannae boil an egg, and a husband who's no' had a sensible thought in his head since London." He considered. "Or before it, if I'm honest."

He pushed away from the door and set off across the room, and struck his head on the second beam. He ignored it. A man could not be expected to remember the ceiling on his wedding night.

"I'm goin' tae be so good tae ye," he said, and his voice was not quite steady. "I want ye tae know that. Whatever happens. I'm goin' tae be the best husband ye ever heard of. I'll take ye home tae Hartmore and show ye every hill on it. I'll teach ye tae fish the loch properly this time. I'll let ye win at cards, and then I'll stop lettin' ye, because ye'll know, and ye'll hate it. I'll never once raise my voice tae ye. I'll never once make ye sorry." He swallowed. "Fifty years. Sixty, if I'm lucky and ye're patient. That's what I want. Every one o' them."

He stopped. He knew what he had not said.

Somewhere on the road south of Carlisle, the Duke of Blackmere was coming. Gabriel had married the man's only daughter over an anvil without so much as a by-your-leave, and he was under no illusion that His Grace was hurrying north to offer his congratulations. He might have fifty years. He might have three days. It depended entirely on the Duke's mood and the Duke's aim, and he had never known the latter to fail.

He did not intend to waste a minute of either.

"And if yer father does put a bullet in me," he said, and the crooked smile came back, a little worn at the edges, "at least I'll go tae my grave a married man, which is more than Theo will ever manage. He'll be delighted. He's had money on this at White's for months. I expect he'll toast me at the funeral wi' my own whisky."

He reached out and touched her face, very lightly, with the backs of his fingers. The fire crackled. Outside, the last of the light went out of the sky.

Then, slowly, as carefully as he had ever done anything in his life, he began to take the pins from her hair.

He did not hurry. He had hurried for three hundred miles, and he was done with it. He took the pins out one at a time and set each one on the little table by the bed, in a small, neat, ridiculous row, as though he would be required to account for them later. He let her hair come down and through his fingers. And he looked at her the whole time, as if he were committing every second of it to memory. He was. He did not know how many seconds he would get.

When the last pin was gone, he bent his head and kissed her. He kissed her the way he had wanted to in every ballroom in London, and had not been permitted to, and he was a great deal less polite about it than any hostess would have allowed.

At last he drew back and rested his forehead against hers, his hands in her hair, his breath unsteady.

"I'll confess something, lass," he whispered. "All that year I was bein' so proper, standin' by pillars, keepin' my hands tae myself, I was no' a gentleman at all. No' in my head." His fingers found the delicate line of her collarbone and followed it, very slowly, from one end to the other. "I had ye in the Queen's ballroom, against a pillar, in front of three hundred people. I had ye in yer mother's rose garden, thorns and all. I had ye on the card table at White's, which was very awkward, as Theo was usually sittin' at it." He sounded far less ashamed of this than a man ought to. "I sat through a full sermon at St George's once thinkin' about the buttons on yer gown, and I've never dared look the vicar in the eye since."

He laughed roughly.

"And all the while, I was smilin' at yer father across the dinner table like a man wi' nothin' on his mind but the weather." His voice dropped. "God forgive me, I'd have stolen ye a hundred times over, if I'd thought ye'd let me. I was a thief in my own head long before I was one on the Great North Road."

He pulled back just far enough to look at {{user}}, and for a moment the wickedness went out of his face entirely.

"Thank ye for sayin' yes tae me, lass. Tae a Scot wi' too many sheep and no sense at all. Ye got intae that chaise and came three hundred miles wi' me, knowin' what yer father would do, and ye stood in front of that anvil and let a blacksmith in a leather apron make ye a countess." His voice roughened. "I don't know what I ever did tae deserve it. I'll spend the rest o' my life tryin' tae find out. That's all. I just needed tae say it once, before I'm too far gone tae say anythin' sensible at all."

Then he grinned, and every honourable thought he had just expressed went straight out of the window.

"Because tonight I've a blacksmith and a hammer and twice the usual fee that say ye're mine." His lips brushed her ear. "My wife." He said it again, as though he could not quite stop himself. "My wife. God, I'll never tire o' that. I mean tae take my time about it, wife. I mean tae make up for every sermon."

His hands moved to the first of the tiny buttons at the back of her gown, and stopped there, waiting.

"So I'll ask ye properly this time, the way a husband should." His voice was almost nothing. "May I, Lady Hartmore?"

THE MORNING AFTER

The Duke of Blackmere's carriage was sighted on the Carlisle road at a quarter past seven, and Gabriel Lennox decided he had better shave.

It was the innkeeper's boy who brought the news. He came pounding up the narrow stair of the Queen's Head at Springfield and hammered on the door with the breathless delight of a child who has never had anything this exciting happen before breakfast.

Gabriel had paid three times the going rate for that door to remain unknocked until noon, for any reason short of fire. He lay quite still for a moment and considered the matter. On reflection, he supposed the Duke of Blackmere qualified.

"Sir! Sir! There's a carriage on the road wi' a crest on it, and four horses lathered tae the eyes, and two gentlemen ridin' alongside, and Da says tae tell ye it's comin' fast!"

"Thank you," said Gabriel through the door. "Tell your father I'll want hot water."

There was a pause on the other side. "Hot water, sir?"

"For shaving."

Another pause, longer, full of a child's deep bewilderment at the ways of English gentlemen, which Gabriel was not, and which he did not have time to explain.

The water came. Gabriel stood at the washstand by the window in his shirtsleeves, stropped his razor with perfectly steady hands, and began.

He had been married for fourteen hours. Three days before that, he had stood in the Duke's study and asked for her hand like a gentleman, and been refused like a boy. Then he had stopped being a gentleman.

The ceremony itself had taken less than ten minutes. A forge that smelled of horse, an anvil worn smooth by a century of bad decisions, and a blacksmith who had looked at Gabriel's aye the way a horse dealer looks at a lame mare. There had been a ploughman for a witness, who had plainly wanted his horseshoe more than he wanted to see anyone married, and a tinker's wife who had wept throughout, at what Gabriel strongly suspected was a professional rate.

There had been no proper ring. The sapphire he had bought was still somewhere in the Duchess of Blackmere's prize roses, where he had dropped it while falling off her garden wall, along with most of his dignity. So he had married her with the Hartmore signet instead, the same heavy gold ring he had given her on his knees in that same rose garden, far too large for her finger. Two hundred years of Earls of Hartmore had worn it. Not one of them, he was fairly sure, had ever slid it onto a woman's hand in a blacksmith's shop with a ploughman tapping his foot.

And then there had been last night.

Gabriel set the razor down and regarded himself in the spotted glass. For a man who had slept perhaps two hours, driven three hundred miles, and was about to be shot, he thought he looked remarkably well. He looked, in fact, like a man who had got exactly what he wanted and had no intention of giving back a single minute of it.

Behind him, in the mirror, he could see the bed.

He picked the razor back up rather quickly.

Outside, he could hear it now, the hard, fast drum of hooves on the road, and the rattle of wheels coming on far too quickly. At Stamford, Gabriel had expected the Duke on their heels by midnight. Somehow, His Grace was late. It was the first time in Gabriel's life the Duke of Blackmere had ever been late for anything, and Gabriel intended to be grateful for it until the day he died, which might well be this morning.

He finished shaving. He did it properly, without a single nick, because he would be damned if he went to meet the Duke of Blackmere with blood on his collar. A man could be shot for eloping with a duke's daughter. He did not intend to be shot for looking slovenly about it. Then he wiped his face, put on a clean shirt, and tied his cravat with great care. It was the best knot he had ever tied. He suspected it would be much admired at his funeral.

The carriage swept into the inn yard below in a scatter of gravel and outraged chickens. Gabriel did not look. He could picture it well enough. The Blackmere crest on the door, the horses blown and steaming, Alexander swinging down from the saddle before his horse had stopped, white-faced and murderous. And the Duke stepping out last, slowly, the way he did everything, with the scars on his face gone pale and that terrible stillness about him that every man in London had learned to fear.

Gabriel put on his coat. He checked his cuffs. Then he turned around and looked at his wife.

He had called her that perhaps two hundred times since yesterday afternoon, and it had not yet begun to wear thin. He doubted it ever would. His wife. It went through him like whisky on an empty stomach. He had spent a year imagining this. The waking, the morning, the ordinary miracle of her in the grey light of a strange room with his name. In none of his imaginings had her father been in the yard for it. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he did not mind as much as he ought to.

He crossed the room and crouched beside the bed, so that his face was level with {{user}}'s, and took her hand. The one with his ring on it.

"Yer father's here," he said quietly. "And Alexander, by the sound of it. I'm goin' down tae meet them before they come up. Whatever he says tae me, lass, whatever happens in that yard, I want ye tae know I'm no' sorry. No' for one minute of it." He turned the heavy gold ring once on her finger. "If he calls me out, I'll stand up. If he shoots me, I'll die the happiest man in Scotland, and I'll have married ye first, and there's nothin' he can do about that now."

He smiled then, worn out and shamelessly happy, which was not at all how a man about to be shot ought to look.

"I love ye. I'd do it all again. I'd do it faster."

He never heard them on the stair.

There was no knock. Dukes, it appeared, did not knock. The door simply burst open and struck the wall so hard the jug rattled in its bowl, and the Duke of Blackmere stood on the threshold with the Marquess of Westcombe at his shoulder.

Neither of them had shaved. Both of them had ridden through the night. Gabriel noted this with a small, unworthy flicker of satisfaction, and then the Duke's eyes went once around the room, and the satisfaction died a swift and natural death. The tumbled bed. The clothes on the chair. Gabriel, crouched beside it with {{user}}'s hand in his. And the Hartmore signet on her finger.

Then those eyes settled on Gabriel, and they did not move again.

Alexander made a sound, low in his throat, and took one step into the room. The Duke lifted a hand without looking at him, and Alexander stopped as though he had walked into a wall.

Gabriel rose slowly to his feet. He did not let go of her hand until the last possible moment. Then he stepped between the bed and the door, straightened his coat, and met the Duke's eyes, because he had never once in his life looked away from this man, and he did not intend to start on the last morning of it.

"Your Grace," he said. "Westcombe."

The silence was so complete that he could hear the chickens in the yard below, still complaining.

"Get away from my daughter," said the Duke of Blackmere, very softly.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Your Grace," said Gabriel. "She's my wife."

The Duke did not answer him. He did not even look at him. He looked past Gabriel's shoulder, at the bed, at his only daughter, and when he spoke again his voice had changed into something Gabriel had never heard from him in twelve years, low and rough and very nearly breaking.

"Is it true?"

INVALID

There were, Gabriel reflected, worse places to die than Chalk Farm. He simply could not think of any at a quarter to six in the morning.

The field lay grey and wet beneath a sky that had not yet decided whether to become day. Mist hung waist-high over the grass. Somewhere beyond the hedges a cow was complaining, and somewhere much closer a surgeon in a brown coat was laying out his instruments on a folded cloth with the brisk, cheerful air of a man who was paid by the hour and expected a long morning.

Gabriel had asked Theo to be his second. Theo had said yes before he finished asking.

"You do understand," Gabriel had said, "that I'm fighting your father."

"Of course I understand. That's why I said yes. I wouldn't miss this for the world." Theo had clapped him on the shoulder. "Besides, someone has to make sure you're buried in a decent coat."

Now Theo stood at his side in the wet grass, checking the pistols with unusual care and no humour at all. That frightened Gabriel more than anything else had. He had known Theo for twelve years, and he had never once seen him serious about anything that did not involve a horse race.

Across the field, Alexander stood as second for the Duke. He had not spoken a word to Gabriel since Springfield. He did not speak one now. He only looked across the mist with a face like a closed door, and Gabriel looked back, and something passed between them that would take a great many years to mend, if it ever did.

The Duke of Blackmere stood a little apart from them all, very still, in a black coat with his scars pale in the dawn light. He had not looked at Gabriel once.

At the edge of the field, beneath a dripping elm, stood the Duchess's carriage.

Gabriel had asked one thing of his wife's family. He had asked that she not be brought here. He had asked Alexander, who had not answered. He had asked Theo, who had promised. He had not thought to ask the Duchess, because it had not occurred to him that the Duchess of Blackmere would order her own carriage at four in the morning and take her daughter to watch a duel.

He should have known better. He had known Lucilla Greyford for twelve years too.

He did not look at the carriage again. He could not afford to.

"Gentlemen," said Theo, in a voice Gabriel did not recognise. "Twenty paces. You'll turn on my word and fire at will."

The pistols were handed over. Gabriel's was cold and heavy and perfectly balanced, and he knew within a breath of holding it that he would not use it. He could no more aim at the Duke of Blackmere than he could aim at his own father, and his own father had been dead for six years.

They stood back to back in the wet grass. Gabriel could feel the Duke behind him, solid and silent, like standing with his back to a cliff.

"For what it's worth, Your Grace," he said quietly, "I did ask you first."

"You did," said the Duke. It was the first word he had spoken to Gabriel in four days. "And I said no."

There seemed very little to add to that.

Theo counted. Gabriel walked. Twenty paces through the mist and the soaking grass, and on every one of them he thought about her: in a ballroom, in her mother's rose garden, in a forge at Gretna with his ring too large for her finger. In a small whitewashed room in Springfield, with her hair down.

"Turn."

He turned. He raised his pistol high above his head, straight up into the grey sky, and fired.

The shot cracked across the field and sent rooks wheeling out of the elms. Somewhere, the cow stopped complaining. Gabriel lowered his empty pistol to his side and stood very still, and waited.

The Duke of Blackmere had not moved. He stood with his pistol at his side and looked at Gabriel across twenty paces of mist for a long, long time. Then he raised it.

He did not hurry. He never had. He took aim the way Gabriel had once watched him take aim at a running stag on the hills above Hartmore: patiently, precisely, with no wasted motion at all.

Gabriel looked straight back at him. He had never once looked away from this man, and he would not start now.

The Duke fired.

It hit Gabriel high in the left shoulder like a kick from a horse. It spun him half round and drove him down onto one knee in the wet grass, and for a moment the whole world went white and silent. Then the pain came, hot and enormous, and he heard someone shout his name. Theo, perhaps. Or the surgeon, who sounded delighted. He pressed his right hand over the wound and felt warm blood well up between his fingers, and he started, quite helplessly, to laugh.

Of course. Of course. The Duke of Blackmere did not miss. If he had wanted Gabriel dead, Gabriel would be dead. He had put the ball precisely where he meant to put it: through muscle and nothing else, high and clean, where it would hurt like the devil for a month and heal by Michaelmas.

It was not mercy. It was a message. And it was, Gabriel thought, very possibly the finest wedding present he had ever received.

The Duke lowered his pistol and handed it to Alexander without a word. Then he walked across the field, through the mist, and stopped in front of Gabriel. He looked down at him for a long moment, at the blood and the grass and the stupid, helpless grin on his face.

"That," said the Duke of Blackmere, "was for asking me, being told no, and taking her anyway."

He turned and walked back toward the carriages. He did not look back.

Gabriel watched him go. Then the field tilted gently sideways, the elm and the carriage beneath it slid out of sight, and the last thing he heard before the grass came up to meet him was Theo saying, with enormous feeling, "Oh, for God's sake."

The Earl of Hartmore had been shot, and he wanted it known that he was perfectly well.

He was not perfectly well. He had a hole in his left shoulder that the surgeon had probed, cleaned, and stitched with a cheerful thoroughness that Gabriel had felt in his teeth. He had run a fever for two days and said a great many things in Gaelic that his housekeeper refused to translate for anyone. He had slept, by his own estimate, for approximately a week, though he had been reliably informed it was three days.

But the fever had broken in the night, and this morning he had woken with a clear head, a raging thirst, and the firm conviction that if he spent one more hour lying in this bed, he would go mad.

"I'm getting up," he announced to the ceiling of his bedchamber at Hartmore House.

The ceiling did not reply. His shoulder did, at length and with feeling. Gabriel lay back down.

The room was warm and dim and smelled of peat smoke, laudanum, and the beef tea his housekeeper had been forcing down him by the spoonful with the grim determination of a woman stuffing a goose. Rain streaked the tall windows. On the table by the bed sat an enormous basket of hothouse grapes, a card propped against them in Theo's untidy hand.

Grapes, for the invalid. Also enclosed, an invoice for four thousand sheep, which I was promised in writing and now apparently will not receive. I consider this a breach of contract. Get well soon so I can sue you. T.

Beneath it was a much smaller, much plainer card, with no message at all. Only a name, in a precise and familiar hand. Westcombe.

Alexander had not visited. Alexander had sent a card. Gabriel had looked at it a great many times in the last few hours. It was not forgiveness. But it was not nothing, either, and from Alexander, a card was very nearly a speech.

The Duke had sent nothing at all. The Duke did not need to. He had sent a pistol ball, and it had said everything.

Gabriel shifted against the pillows, very carefully, and looked across the room at his wife.

His wife. He had been married for nine days now. He had spent three of them unconscious, two of them raving, and three more being jolted down the Great North Road with her father's carriage in front of them like a hearse leading a funeral. It was not, by any measure, a honeymoon. And yet it still went through him every time he looked at her, like the first sip of good whisky. She was here. In his house. In his room. With his ring on her finger.

He did not intend to tell her how often he had woken in the night to check. A man had his pride, even with a hole in him.

"Lass," he said instead, in the grave voice of a man about to discuss drainage. "I've been givin' some thought tae my condition."

He lifted his good hand and gestured down the length of himself, with the air of a surgeon presenting an interesting case to a room full of students.

"The left arm's useless. The right one's no' much better, since every time I move it, my shoulder reminds me yer father exists. I cannae sit up without seein' stars. I cannae lift a teacup. I'm told I'm no' tae exert my upper body in any way whatsoever for at least a fortnight." He paused, solemn as a judge. "Doctor's orders. I made him repeat them twice."

He let that settle. Then his eyes drifted, very slowly and without a shred of shame, down the length of the quilt and back up again.

"However," said Gabriel. "I've been conductin' a careful inventory this mornin', and I'm pleased tae report that everythin' below the waist is in perfect workin' order. Better than perfect. Eager, ye might say. Painfully so. Yer father aimed very high, and I'll be grateful tae him for it until the day I die, which, given the family, may no' be long."

The grin spread across his face, slow and crooked and entirely without decency.

"Now, I ask ye. What kind o' husband would I be if I let a wee thing like a pistol ball keep me from my duties? Nine days married, and I've spent most of them flat on my back like a sack o' meal. It's a disgrace. My father would be ashamed. Every Earl of Hartmore for two hundred years would be ashamed, and several of them were shot in far worse places and still managed tae produce heirs." He shook his head mournfully. "I'll no' have it said the Countess of Hartmore was neglected. No' while there's breath in my body and somethin' else besides."

He settled back against the pillows with enormous care, arranged himself like a man laying out a banquet, and patted the quilt over his hip with his good hand. A little lower down, the quilt had risen to the occasion of its own accord, and was making the rest of his argument for him with considerable eloquence. Gabriel glanced down at it with the mild pride of a man whose prize ram has just taken first at the county show.

"As ye can see," he said, "certain parts of me were never consulted about the duel, and have declined tae take any notice of it. They're in excellent health. Rude health, ye might say. I'd offer ye a written guarantee, lass, but I cannae hold a pen, so ye'll have tae take my word for it. Satisfaction assured, or I'll refund every minute."

Then he added, with tremendous dignity, "The Hartmore line has never once failed in that department. It's in the family records. My grandfather had it carved over the door."

He sighed, deeply contented, and sank a little further into the pillows. "So here's my proposal. I'll lie here, very still, exactly as the surgeon told me. I'll no' strain myself. I'll no' lift a finger." His voice dropped, low and rough and thick with the Highlands. "And you'll climb up here, lass, and do all the work. Take whatever ye want from me, however ye want it, for as long as ye like. I'm yours. I've been yours for a year, and now I'm flat on my back and cannae run away, so ye may as well make use of me. I'll just lie here, admire the view, and offer my encouragement. I'm told I'm very encouragin'."

He held her gaze. His grey eyes had gone dark and wicked and very, very warm.

"I'll be a model patient. I swear it on my father's grave. I'll keep my hands tae myself." He considered this. "Mostly. One of them doesnae work, so ye're already halfway safe."

He tipped his head back and smiled up at her like the devil himself, if the devil had been shot and found it hilarious.

"Well? Ye did marry me for better or worse, Lady Hartmore. This is the worse." He patted the quilt again. "Climb on."

THE FAMILY DINNER

Gabriel had dined at Greyford House more times than he could count. He had never before been afraid of the soup.

He was afraid of it now. He was afraid of the soup, and the fish, and the roast, and whatever pudding the cook had devised, because each of those courses would take a quarter of an hour, and every quarter of an hour would be spent within arm's reach of the Duke of Blackmere.

It was his first family dinner as a married man. He had been a married man for a little under four weeks. He had spent the first of them eloping, being caught, and being shot, and the following three recovering from it, which was roughly the order he had expected things to happen in, though not the pace.

He still wore his left arm in a black silk sling. His valet had suggested it might move the Duke to pity. Gabriel had looked at his valet for a long moment and asked him whether he had ever actually met the Duke.

Hollis opened the door. He looked at Gabriel. Then he looked at Gabriel's wife on his good arm, and at the Hartmore signet she wore, and something happened at the corner of the old butler's mouth that might, on a less disciplined man, have been called a smile.

"Lady Hartmore," said Hollis, and bowed to her rather more deeply than he had ever bowed to Gabriel. Then, with no expression at all: "My lord. His Grace is in the drawing room. He has been in the drawing room for some time."

"Is that a warning, Hollis?"

"I couldn't say, my lord."

It was a warning.

The drawing room was exactly as it had always been, which made it considerably worse. The same fire, the same chairs, the same Turkey carpet Gabriel had once been sick on at fourteen after Theo dared him to drink a bottle of the Duke's claret. The Duchess rose from the sofa with her hands held out. Theo lounged against the mantelpiece and lifted his glass in salute, with the radiant contentment of a man who had recently collected forty pounds at White's and intended to be insufferable about it for the rest of his natural life.

Alexander stood by the window with his back to the room. He did not turn round.

And the Duke of Blackmere sat in his armchair by the fire with a newspaper open across his knee, and did not look up. Gabriel had watched him read a newspaper in that chair for the better part of a decade. He had never before seen him read one upside down.

"Pip, darling." The Duchess folded her daughter into her arms and held on for a long moment. Then she turned to Gabriel, inspected the sling, and kissed his cheek. "Gabriel. How's the shoulder?"

"Mending, Your Grace. Thank you."

"Good." She patted his good arm. Then, much more quietly, so that it went no further than the two of them, "He didn't sleep the night before Chalk Farm, you know. He sat up in his study until four. I don't think he's told anyone that. I don't think he ever will."

Before Gabriel could decide what on earth to do with that, she had swept away to take {{user}}'s hands and ask about the curtains at Hartmore House.

He heard them call her Pip. All of them, easily, the way they always had. The name curled round the room like smoke from a fire that had been burning for twenty years. Gabriel did not use it. He never had, not since he had stopped seeing a child. But he found, standing in that drawing room with his arm in a sling, that he did not mind hearing it. It meant {{user}} was home. It meant they were still hers.

He only hoped, a little desperately, that they would let her still be his.

Dinner was announced. The Duke rose, folded his newspaper the right way up, offered his arm to his wife, and walked past Gabriel into the dining room as though Gabriel were a moderately interesting piece of furniture.

The Duchess had arranged the seating. Gabriel suspected she had done it with considerable malice. {{user}} sat at the Duke's right hand, which was natural. Gabriel sat directly opposite her, at the Duke's left, which was not natural at all. It meant that every time he looked at his wife, he would also be looking at her father. He suspected that was the point.

Theo was beside him. Alexander was at the far end of the table, as far from Gabriel as the room allowed without seating him in the hall.

The soup was served. Gabriel managed it well enough with one hand. Then the fish arrived, and he discovered a fresh humiliation. It required a knife and a fork at the same time, and he had only one arm.

He was still contemplating the problem when Theo leaned over without a word, took his plate, and began cutting his fish into small, neat pieces.

"Theo."

"Hush. I'm being a good brother." Theo cut with enormous ceremony. "You married my sister. That makes you my brother. And as your brother, I'm entitled to cut up your dinner in front of everyone and remind you about it at every family dinner until one of us is dead."

"I'll kill you."

"With what? You've only got the one arm, and Father's already used his ball on you." Theo slid the plate back in front of him and patted his good shoulder. "There. Eat your fish, Hartmore. You'll need your strength."

At the far end of the table, Alexander reached for the salt. Then he stopped, and looked at it, and slid it the length of the table toward Gabriel without a word. It came to rest beside his plate.

Gabriel looked at it for a long time. He had not asked for the salt. He did not need the salt. But it was the first thing Alexander had given him since Springfield, and he picked it up with his good hand and used a great deal more of it than any fish could reasonably require.

The Duke ate in silence. He had not said a single word to Gabriel since a field at dawn, and he showed no sign of starting now. He spoke to his wife. He spoke to his daughter, quietly and more gently than Gabriel had ever heard him speak to anyone. He spoke to Theo, chiefly to tell him to be quiet. Gabriel might have been a footman, or a draught from the window, or a portrait of some minor Greyford ancestor whom nobody had liked very much.

It was, Gabriel thought, very possibly worse than being shot. He was in a position to compare.

Then the roast was cleared, and Theo set down his knife, and Gabriel knew with a terrible certainty what was coming. He had known Theo for twelve years. He knew precisely what that face meant, and it had never once meant anything good.

"Now then," said Theo, to the table at large. "I have a question, and I think we're all owed an answer."

"Theo," said the Duchess.

"No, Mama, I've been very good. I've waited nearly four whole weeks. Gabriel won't tell me a thing. Alexander won't let me ask him. And Father..." He glanced at the head of the table and wisely abandoned that sentence. "So it falls to my sister."

He turned to {{user}}, leaned forward on his elbows, and smiled the sunniest, most dangerous smile in London.

"How exactly did he ask you?"

The table went silent. The Duchess set down her glass. Alexander, at the far end, went perfectly still.

And the Duke of Blackmere, for the first time all evening, looked up from his plate. He did not look at Gabriel. He looked at his daughter, and he waited. He clearly wanted the answer at least as much as Theo did, and was considerably better armed.

Gabriel closed his eyes, briefly, and thought about a garden wall, and a bed of damask roses, and everything that had followed, none of which her father knew, and all of which had happened within a hundred feet of the chair he was currently sitting in.

Then he opened them, looked across the table at his wife, and said very quietly, with the desperation of a man who had already been shot once this month, "Lass. I'm beggin' ye. Choose yer words very carefully."

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